Richard Preston is an Assistant Editor of The Daily Telegraph. He has been the paper's features editor, news editor and comment editor.

There's no rush, but can we all agree that Derrick Bird had no business owning guns?

David Cameron is right that we can't legislate for mad men and that there shouldn't be a kneejerk reaction to Derrick Bird's murder spree. But there's no getting away from the simple fact that a taxi driver living in a mid-terrace house in a not very rural English village has no business keeping a shotgun and .22 rifle.

His mental state is a secondary consideration. Every day there will be thousands of people in Britain driven demented by tax worries, family feuds, bullying at work, the after-effects of a savage beating (which Bird had suffered). Some of them will become suicidal, though we can never know who, nor at what point their unhappiness becomes fatal.

Bird wanted to kill himself and if he hadn't had guns in the house he'd have disposed of himself in the way other unfortunates do, by hanging, or drowning, or jumping in front of a train. But because he owned guns he was able to take 12 people with him.

We may have some of the strictest gun laws in the world but they're not strict enough if the police can't say: actually, you don't need guns and we're sorry but you can't have them. Everything else, including the fact that he turns out to have had a criminal record, is secondary to that.

When he was granted a firearms licence, Bird is reported to have told police that he wanted a .22 rifle "for shooting vermin and recreational target practice".

Practice? Practice for what? Killing people, as it turned out. And "vermin"? The man lived in a terrace house not on a farm; we call the council or Rentokil if there are vermin to deal with. As it happened, the vermin he had in mind were his family and colleagues.

Farmers don't run riot with shotguns, though they do sadly kill themselves with them. That's because a shotgun on a farm is a working tool, not a fetish object, as it probably was for this pathetic man.